Discussion Topic

[This is a new and improved version of the original account. Two illustrative videos have been added.]

The "how many pullups could you do before you reached your current nadir of decrepitude" thread got me to thinking about stupid feats of strength, apparently an active sideline for many climbers.

Although I see no hope of achieving either fame or notoriety for mere feats of strength, a very competitive category, when stupidity is added to the mix I believe I can taste the gold, which is not to say that there aren't worthy competitors who have also managed to combine exceptional physical prowess with notable intellectual deficits.

As my entry in the sweepstakes, I offer the saga of the triple lever.

Most of you probably know what a front lever is. John Gill did 'em one-handed. The performer's body is held rigidly horizontal, facing up, suspended from straight arms. Its a bit harder than it looks.

(Gill doing the ordinary two-hand variety)

Now a double front lever requires two idio...er, performers. The first does a front lever on whatever apparatus is available, and the second does a front lever off the shoulders of the first. You can see where this is headed. In a triple front lever, a third person does a front lever on the shoulders of the second person, who is doing a front lever on the shoulders of the first person.

There is, of course, no limit to this process in theory, but in practice the top person, sometimes referred to in the technical literature as the chief idiot, has to support his or her own weight and in addition the weights of the assistant idiots underneath. At some point, the design limits of the chief's sinews will be exceeded, and so there is a practical, if not theoretical, limit to the number of levering losers.

In our case, there were three of us who could do front levers, and so a triple lever it was. In addition to myself, the cast included the legendary Gunks master Jim McCarthy and the much-beloved "Mayor of the Gunks" Kevin Bein.

Of the three of us, Jim was the biggest and strongest in absolute terms, so it was clear that he would be on top. Kevin, who had survived long ground falls directly onto his head, was apparently the most durable, and since it was to be many years before crash pads would appear on the scene, we put him on the bottom. That left the middle position for me.

Before taking our show on the road, we naturally practiced it under ideal gym conditions. Jim did a front lever on the rings, I pulled into a front lever on his shoulders, Kevin popped into a lever on my shoulders and we started to count off the requisite three seconds of holding for full gymnastic credit.

Somewhere around two Jim's hands exploded off the rings and the whole ham sandwich hit the one-inch horsehair gym mat with a loud thud combined with the triple "uuuhhh" resulting from the attending full-body compressions.

Here is a contemporary repetition of our feat:

Having thus perfected our craft, we went on to our first engagement, a typical Vulgarian rave at Tom Scheur's house. Here, after ingesting various judgment-relaxing palliatives, we determined to perform our feat of strength for an audience unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy and suffering from various exotic and usually pleasurable forms of attention-deficit disorder.

There being no ring set available, we settled on the next best thing, a beefy quarter-inch doorjam at the top of a flight of stairs leading down to the basement. Jim pulled into his lever, I followed suit on his shoulders, and Kevin just barely managed to crank into the horizontal position on my shoulders when Jim's grip on the quarter-inch edge inexplicably failed.

With toes pointed and in perfect form, the team made the rather arduous journey down to the basement, accompanied by thunderous thudding and various exclamations of discomfort, especially from Kevin, doing yeoman duty on the bottom as combination crash pad and rocket sled. The audience treated our sudden disappearance and the subsequent sounds of mayhem with the equanimity one would expect of those languishing in the midst of private miracles.

Our faith in Kevin's indestructibility was well-placed, and we mounted the stairs sore but uninjured to the puzzled looks of our fans, who were unsure where we had gone and why we were now returning from the basement.

Although there were no lasting injuries, our memory of the various impacts argued for retirement, and so the saga of the triple lever came to a premature and inglorious end.

Time marches on, and even the most highly-trained athletes such as ourselves eventually have their most exceptional achievements regularly performed at middle-school talent shows. So it should be no surprise that, our heartbreaking failures notwithstanding, the triple lever is alive and well in the twenty-first century:

With toes pointed and in perfect form, the team made the rather arduous journey down to the basement, accompanied by thunderous thudding and various exclamations of discomfort, especially from Kevin, doing yeoman duty on the bottom as combination crash pad and rocket sled. The audience treated our sudden disappearance and the subsequent sounds of mayhem with the equanimity one would expect of those languishing in the midst of private miracles.

I almost sprayed coffee through my nose when I read this. Definitely one of the funniest bits of writing I've read in a while on here...

excellent story. the pinnacle of talented buffoonery! I think it might have been Kevin and Barbara Bein who set up an early rings rig in C4, around '72. Really cool folk. He would do planches and maybe an iron cross or two.

Kevin may have served as a human crashpad in our lever misadventure, but his house in the Gunks was a reknowned climber's crash pad, in the original sense, and he is loved and missed by all of us who were fortunate enough to know him. Here's Kevin's cover shot from a 1970 issue of Climbing Magazine.

We lost Kevin in 1988 in a rappelling accident on the Hornli Ridge of the Matterhorn, and our world became just a little darker. Twenty-one years later, it is a rare day when I'm out at the cliffs and do not think of him. The tears are long since dried, and it is usually a smile, albeit a bittersweet one, that accompanies the memories now.

You are an excellent writer, Rich, and that is fun to read.
It makes me wish I had been part of that eastern group. But then
in some way I guess I was, since both you and McCarthy came to
Boulder and looked me up, and we climbed, and I've known and
respected both of you ever since. I did more climbs with you,
though, through the years, that big wall in the Royal Gorge where
we spent a nice night on a ledge, as cars rattled the wood planks
of the bridge overhead, among the stars... I remember our bouldering
on Flagstaff and in Yosemite. I even have a photo of you when
I was preparing to do a climb of Fairview Dome with Kamps, and
you and Higgins and Kelsey were there watching us sort gear...
You've just always been there. Sorry if I get a little sentimental
at times, but I pretty much only have my memories anymore.

How fitting a piece, Rich. Are you sure you are a math professor? I did not know Kevin as well as you did, but find myself thinking of him riding his bike out to the cliffs most times when I drive up the hairpin turn below the Trapps.

I swear, if I read one more lame ass, half assed self promoting article by a Bisharat or the same ol same ol from Samet, I'm canceling everything but Alpinist and starting my own rag."

Thanks for the kind words, but let's remember those guys have to churn something out every month. We'd use up our best stories in probably less than a year and then we'd have to start faking it. Start your own rag and you too will confront this problem...

Hilarious story, Rich! Thanks for sharing it. What tickles me most is your collective faith in Jim's finger strength! Likely the only time that he was the weak link in any endeavor! Somewhere between extreme gymnastics and circus arts it could have opened up a wholly new category in Accidents in North American Mountaineering! LOL

A cursory web search suggests that this stunt is really unique. It doesn't seem that anyone else can hold these, although there are some videos of guys pulling up into them. At any rate, there can't be more than a very few people, besides Gill, who can do 'em.

Really Curt? I never saw it, and I spent quite a bit of time doing stupid tricks with Keven. But I'll certainly take your word for it; Kevin was very strong at iron crosses, and that lateral levering strength is a necessary component for the one-arm front lever.

While looking (in vain) on the web for evidence that anyone else can hold a one-arm front lever, I did come across a feat of strength beyond anything I saw Gill do: the one-arm rope climb.

I don't know if you ever visited Kevin and Barb while they were in Custer, but he had a 4x4 cantilevered from his counter top, from which Mark Jacobs and I both saw Kevin hold a one-arm front lever. Very impressive--although Gill's front lever (Gill being about 9 inches taller) was probably even more impressive.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, this shot of me doing a straddle front lever, provides mute commentary, compared to the perfection of the earlier Gill photos, on the ravages of time.

Photo: Steve Molis

My excuse for the far less than ideal form and the straddle leg position is that the shot was taken yesterday on my 66th birthday and I'm lucky not to be spending my time in more or less the same position six feet under.

Writing is the activity for which Goldstone has the least native talent.

Oh? I didn't see him at the Gunks a lot but did get an impression of power, drive, intelligence, and attention to detail, or call it thorougness or call it finesse. Denny Merritt said that he and someone else were having difficulty on the start to Double Clutch. RG came along and showed them how to do it. Then he showed them how to do it using the other arm.

He once gave me a spot on a boulder problem on the Carriage Road. It was the lightest touch possible yet made the move safe and offered unobtrusive direction at the same time. It was only much later I heard he had a gymnastics background.

I wish him and his other native talents a happy birthday, if the poster above has it aright.

MH2:
I hope I did not mislead you. Rich's writing is so obviously exceptional I figured I could, put a little english on the ball. The message is, "You think his writing is good. That is just the start of it."

Well Dave, you don't have to climb it to do a triple lever on it, now do you?

The plan was to perform said stunt on the Birdie Party ceiling.

The events I described suggested that the old bong that was up there at the time might be called on to hold a three-man leader fall, a prospect that made the bumpy trip down Scheuer's basement steps look almost appealing.

Realizing that we had already set a new standard for optimism untempered by reality, we decided to rest on our rather badly crushed laurels and forgo the glory of a cliffside performance.

I might add that McCarthy was so disappointed in our reluctance to embrace this challenge that he went off and set the Olympic record in the standing backward broadjump.

The record was, sadly, ultimately disallowed, since it was claimed that by dousing his entire back yard with gasoline and then igniting it while standing in the midst of the treated area, he had provided himself with an unfair advantage, there being, at the time, some rather quaint regulations about the allowable intensity of jump-abetting shock waves.

Only a few days ago I was talking to a friend who started climbing in the Gunks, I mentioned some of the gunk climbers I had climbed with over the years and Kevin's name came up. I was lucky enough to climb quite a bit with Keven in Elderado and Yosemite. He was probably one of my all time favorite climbing partners, not just a great climber but a wonderful person to be around. He had a nack for always making the climbing fun even if we were having a desperate time with the route we were attempting. I had forgotten all about the triple lever story, Kevin was the one who told me about it. We did a double lever on his rings he had set up in C4 to my surprise it was easier to hold the lever with him hanging on my shoulders.

Thank you for the bumps, because I somehow missed this until now. I got to meet Kevin in Camp 4 in the early 1970's, when he was demonstrating a front lever on an ad hoc ring set. We lost an extraordinary person when he went. I also remember a picture of McCarthy doing a front lever in Dachstein Mitts in a Chouinard catalog around the same time.

Fortunately, we still have gems like Rich still with us to relate these stories to us (and Peter to bring it to photographic life!).

Two of my stories with historical content have received New Year's bumps from Steve Grossman. This one, through no fault of my own, has also acquired some historical material, but that isn't why I'm bumping it.

In these times of national and international dysfunction, the sheer pointlessness of the triple lever and our epic failures in performing it bring me a smile of nostalgia for a time when there seemed to be more room in our lives for unabashed silliness.

Happy New Year to all, and may you find time for some nonsense in your own lives.

Herewith, a bump from the SuperTopo Archives of Irrelevant Fluff. I can't invoke Jim's newly-minted cry of BBST, since it would be pretentious for the author to assert his own work made anything better. And so I've adopted the pretense that, by virtue of having added two illustrative videos to the the account, I have made it something new, or at least not entirely old, and so, I hope, worthy of a second look.